Is this grain normal for dark shots?

[helloGreenStar]

Hey everyone,

I've been working with a lot of low light photo scenarios and I keep seeing this heavy grain over and over again in my photos (attached) and am wondering if this is normal or if there's something I can do in Photoshop CS5 to correct it if it's just how the camera spits out the image?

Settings for original photo:

Exposure: 8
Aperture: f/11
Focal Length: 22mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0EV

Thanks for any help/input. I appreciate it.

edit: here's a link to the image in case the attached thumbnail doesn't open: http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/8...ainexample.jpg

[monkeygirl123]

I can't see the picture

[helloGreenStar]

Not sure why it isn't showing the attachment.

Here's a link to it uploaded to imageshack

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/8...ainexample.jpg

[monkeygirl123]

It may be my monitor, but I can't see any grain - at least not the type of grain I was expecting to see. It may help if you posted a different part of the image which isn't predomnantly black I can see a 'fuzz' around the blue parts but I'm not entiely sure what those parts are...it just looks like a cool lighting effect to me.

[RLucas]

I don't see any grain/noise either. Not sure what you mean?

[helloGreenStar]

Not sure why but it looks like when I save in Photoshop as a JPG it smooths a lot of the problems out. In Photoshop, it looks really pixelated with 3-4 different shades of gray squares.

[OsmosisStudios]

Well, the image you linked to is small: a 100% sized version would help.

[Izzy]

I see the tiniest amount of grain. This is what I would consider normal for low light conditions. Lightroom 3 has a tool that will remove this nicely. I know there are other available for download. Not sure which works best.

[helloGreenStar]

@Adam - yeah, it is a 100% crop from the photo. For some reason it smoothed it out a bunch from the original jpg shot when I cropped it and saved it.

@Izzy - looks like I need to get Lightroom then. This is just unacceptable to me

[Izzy]

Originally Posted by helloGreenStar

@Izzy - looks like I need to get Lightroom then. This is just unacceptable to me

If you are a student you should be able to get it for less than $100. Ebay seems to be a gouger at this time. There other ways like torrents but I will not go into those here other than to say the LR3 torrent is clean.